Robert Rauschenberg

It was like 10 cents for a quart can downtown, because nobody knew what
color it was.  I would just go and buy a whole mess of paint, and the only organization, choice or discipline was that I had to use some or all of it, and I wouldn't buy any more paint until I'd used that up.
[quoted in catalog to Color Chart exhibition at MoMA 2008]

Robert Rauschenberg

I think you're born an artist or not.  I couldn't have learned it.  And I hope I never do because knowing more only encourages your limitations.

Man Ray

There is no progress in art, any more than there is progress in making love.
There are simply different ways of doing it.

Jonathan Rée

Works of art, however beautiful they are, will fail if they are phony, imperceptive, stupid or obtuse; and that works that disappoint the adepts of beauty may still articulate issues about the world and the way it presents itself to our senses.  If a work does not achieve beauty, it may still bear witness to truth. [Prospect March 2009]

Ad Reinhardt

Sculpture is what you bump into when you’re trying to get a good look at a painting.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir
(1841-1914)

If you can explain a picture, it wouldn't be art.  Shall I tell you what I think are the two qualities of a work of art? First, it must be indescribable, and, second, it must be inimitable.  [In interview with Walter Pach 1912]

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

A picture should be pleasing, cheerful and pretty - yes, pretty!  There are plenty of dull things in life without creating any more.  I know people aren’t willing to admit that a picture can be a great painting if it is a cheerful one.  Because Fragonard laughed, he was soon classified as a minor artist.  Cheerful people aren't taken seriously.  Art got up in a pompous fashion will always impress.  
[Quoted in Francois Fosca, Renoir: His Life and Work, 1962]

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

I consider women writers, lawyers, and politicians. . . as monsters. . . The woman artist is merely ridiculous.  

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

The work of art must seize you, wrap you up in itself, carry you away.  

William Riley

Just because I made a painting, doesn't mean I know all there is to know about it.  

Diego Rivera

If it isn't propaganda, it isn't art.

Diego Rivera

To be an artist, one must first be a man vitally concerned with all problems of social struggle. . . never withdrawing from life.

Auguste Rodin

Great works of art, which are the highest proof of human intelligence and sincerity, say all that can be said on man and on the world, and besides, they teach that there is something more that cannot be known . . .We (artists) are misunderstood.  Lines and colors are only to us symbols of hidden realities.  Our eyes plunge beneath the surface to the hidden meaning of things, and when afterwards we reproduce the form, we endow it with the spiritual meaning which it covers. An artist worthy of the name should express all the truth of nature, not only the exterior truth, but also, and above all, the inner truth.
[Art, 1912]

James Rosenquist

It was startling and incredible.  But I couldn’t get a handle on one piece – I looked at it for 2 hours, I couldn’t even realize a question out of it.
(On visiting Robert Rauschenberg and seeing new his work at 3:00 am)

Susan Rothenburg

You make art by taking a lot of time looking at it.

Mark Rothko

There is more power in telling little than in telling all. 
[Lecture to the Pratt Institute, 1958]

Georges Rouault

Subjective artists are one-eyed, but objective artists are blind.

Donald Rumsfeld

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.  [March 2003]

John Ruskin
  (1819-1900)

Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts, the book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art.  Not one of these books can be understood unless we read the two others, but of the three the only trustworthy one is the last.

John Russell

When art is made new, we are made new with it.  We have a sense of solidarity with our own time, and of psychic energies shared and redoubled, which is just about the most satisfying thing that life has to offer.  [The Meanings of Modern Art]